Joe Stack Plane Crash: Why Did He Hate the IRS Enough to Kill?

We certainly received, and continue to receive, a range of opinion on the final act of Andrew Joseph Stack III. Since that day, many news outlets have attributed a 1986 tax law change as the source of his anger expressed in the Stack “manifesto” many of you have been commenting on.

Joseph Andrew Stack’s seething hatred for the IRS appeared to have roots at least two decades long, judging from the web post he left behind before crashing his plane into in an Austin, Texas office building Thursday where some 200 employees of the tax agency worked.

The anti “tax man” fuse may have been lit in Stack in 1986, when the software engineer confronted a change in tax law, that required companies using high-tech contractors to withhold part of their salaries for income tax purposes. In the online letter discovered after the crash, Stack wrote, “They could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave.”

Calvin Johnson, a law professor at the University of Texas who specializes in federal tax laws told the Austin American Statesman it appeared Stack was looking for a way out of the withholding system.